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§ The time has finally come for me to migrate away from blogs.sun.com and Blogger, where my two main blogs have been hosted for many years. Welcome to The Wild Mink, where I’ll be posting daily comment and occasional analysis just as I have been since around 2002. Except maybe a bit more free-range…

Why now? Because the end of the FTP service at Blogger has meant that the original Webmink blog will go silent on March 1st, I have been planning this for a while. The obvious shift in attitude at Oracle means that after Sun UK merges – on March 1st as well – I’ll not feel comfortable blogging there either. The blogs.sun.com site was a genuinely industry-changing innovation and I am still proud to have played a part in making it happen, but “to everything there is a season”. And finally, I have always believed it’s best to blog on a domain one owns.

How? I’ll leave the Delicious auto-poster posting both at SunMink and here for the time being, but any new work will appear here. I’ll archive copies of the old blogs for safe keeping, just in case any policy changes make them go away one day. Hopefully regular readers will change their subscription feeds – I’ll start posting notices to that effect next week.

I can hear so many people speaking sorrowfully about this “obvious shift in attitude”, especially some of my friends at Sun Microsystems Czech (which is still the official name, at least for the state authorities).

But nobody goes any further and nobody explains how exactly is the attitude changing and what does it mean (not for the customers or stocks, but for them personally, for the OpenSolaris community outside the company and so on).

On the other hand, I don’t see people massively leaving their jobs at Sun (pardon me, Oracle) because of frustration and thinking whether they can better leverage their kernel coding skills at Linux vendors or at Microsoft ..

So, can you please define what is this “shift in attitude” about? Why is everybody speaking in puzzles?

It’s a matter of tone really – it’s been made pretty clear that Oracle blogging is about Oracle business, and I don’t feel comfortable making comments on politics and religion on their web properties (even though in most cases I do so in relation to digital freedoms. Don’t read too much into it, but do expect to see more people making the switch.

It’s really too early for people to be leaving through choice… so far, development of Sun products is continuing much as it did before Oracle took over. I’d expect this to change over time as Oracle decide what will make money and what won’t, and that’s when you’ll probably see people choosing to move to companies more like the Sun of old.

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All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.